Comment by kunley

Even more unfriendly-yet-typical line is where you create an allocator, and few lines further you run allocator() method on it, to get ...an allocator (but you had it already! Or maybe you didn't ?) Same: you create Writer, but then you run a writer() method on it.

Here is the code to illustrate:

    var arena = std.heap.ArenaAllocator.init(std.heap.page_allocator);
    defer arena.deinit();
    var visited = std.BufSet.init(arena.allocator());

    var bw = std.io.bufferedWriter(std.io.getStdOut().writer());
    const stdout = bw.writer();

So.. what are the entities we use, conceptually? "allocatorButNotReally" and "thisTimeReallyAnAllocatorIPromise"? Same for the writer?

Plus, the documentation isn't much explaining wtf is this and why.

The answer is probably buried somewhere in forums history, blogs and IRC logs, because there must have been consensus established why is it ok to write code like that. But, the lack of clear explanation is not helping with casual contact with the language. It's rather all-or-nothing - either you spend a lot of time daily in tracking all the media about the ecosystem, or you just don't get the basics. Not good IMO. (and yes I like a lot about the language).